Modern Robinson Crusoe

dl4gbe

Imagine: You are modern Robinson Crusoe stranded on a uninhabited island millions of miles from next human live. No communication possible (no, no you are not allowed to build a radio transmitter). You got a container full with PC hardware. Unfortunatelly you do not have any software. Like said all harddisks are formatted, nothing on them. Sure you got electricity because you could save a emergency generator and tons of gasoline. Also you could save a container full of computer literature. My question is. Can you get one of the PC's working writing an OS from scratch? I mean just having a BIOS? Sincerely Chris ;P -- modified at 23:23 Tuesday 17th January, 2006

ProffK

No. You have no way of executing even the simplest command, a single machine code instruction. I used to get high on life until I realized that life was cut with morons - Unknown

Aamir Butt

umm.... No. Where do I write my program to boot something. Everything is totally formatted, Right? It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world everyday always just exactly fits the newspaper. - Jerry Seinfeld

J Dunlap

You've got a chicken-and-egg scenario here - you have to be able to boot the computer in order to program it. If you happened to have a type of BIOS with a special feature that allowed you to write machine code as hex values, or assembly instructions, and then executed them, that might be a different matter.

Tim Orr

Are these the old IBM PCs with MS BASIC in ROM?

peterchen

No OS on it? tricky. The biggest challenge is to get the first couple of instructions on the machine and executing, the rest is just dedication. But what for? Writing a PONG game? I suck at it anyway.

Some of us walk the memory lane, others plummet into a rabbit hole
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code frog 0

Well that should teach you! Obviously, you didn't take this through any type of development methodology did you? :) If you had the first step would have uncovered that you never really want to ask these types of questions of developers.

Pretty soon now, in fact just about any time I'm expecting to see: "Was that an African Swallow or a Europoean Swallow?" and well you know how it's going to go from there.

Your problem definition left out one fact that I picked up on and so did they. PC's need boot instructions they don't just magically bring up all the hardware, etc...

You needed to assert that a boot sector had been defined and a primitive shell would come up. Something like the command prompt. You also needed to spell out which compilers are present. You have a few other minor details but ...

Without a clear definition to your problem there's no feasible solution. "Time for the Holy Hand Grenade! One----Two----Four Uh, that's Three sir. Roiyt... Three!!!" and there you go. :)

Some assembly required.

Code-frog System Architects, Inc.

RandomMonkey

Mine the resources (assuming the island has enough, and that you have enough gasoline and stuff), and build yourself a CD creation factory. Then figure out the exact sequence of pits to recreate a Windows XP install disk, and burn it onto the disk. Then die of old age. :) Debugging - The high art and magic of cussing errors into 'features'

Ashley van Gerven

If you're stranded on an island what on earth use would you have for a computer? You said communication is not possible so you wouldn't even be able to browse CP!! what use is that?!? Maybe to track position of coconut trees? I guess your best bet would be to just *hope* that Bill Gates owns that island and that he has a windows XP install disc the next time he visits :-D

dl4gbe

Hallo, Robinson actually needs a computer. Because he is bored he would like to create some games to play with. Ok, I forgot to mention two small details. 1. A soldering iron, multimeter e.t.c is avaiable. Also cable from the many pcs. 2. Yes, sure not an old IBM PC. (With basic on it) There must be a way. Robinson has tons of computers . Not just one. Can we not somehow create a flash burner out of the computer hardware. Or connect somehow a keyboard to the ide controller. Something wild like this. Or replace the bios with some handwired memory? Sincerely Chris :)

Baconbutty

Take the cases and monitors, fill any ventilation holes with mushed up coconut husks, then lash them all together with twine made from the ever dependable banana leaves to make a raft. Use any CDs as mirror signalling devices while you float away from the island. Or simply press F1 for help :) I still remember having to write your own code in FORTRAN rather than be a cut and paste merchant being pampered by colour coded Intellisense - ahh proper programming - those were the days :) -- modified at 4:11 Wednesday 18th January, 2006

Vikram A Punathambekar

I like the part about pressing F1 the best. :-D Cheers, Vikram.

"When I read in books about a "base class", I figured this was the class that was at the bottom of the inheritence tree. It's the "base", right? Like the base of a pyramid." - Marc Clifton. i dont mind to be a stupid,better than being a moron - Adnan Siddiqi.

Lost User

What sort of peripheral devices and what sort of boot strap loader is available? Nunc est bibendum

hairy_hats

If you're on an island millions of miles from the next human life, you've clearly mastered interstellar travel, so getting a PC to work should be child's play...

Kim0618

it sounds interesting ! The situation is similiar to the very beginning of life form on earth. There was just a large bowl of protein molecules soup which built up creatures later. Just think of each pc like a molecule, and if the pcs can be connected( transfering stuff/information by floppy disk), it seems possible that those connected PCs can form a networking OS similiar to life made up by protein molecules !

Vivek Rajan

What is the point if you are not allowed to build a radio transmitter ? You cant even surf for prOn to help you on the island. You really want to forget about the BIOS, work directly with the processor. Step 1: Build a circuit with 32 switches to represent a word. Step 2: Build a circuit to transfer the word corresponding to the switch position to RAM directly via the address & data bus. Step 3: Build a circuit to strobe the address and data by pushing a switch. Step 4: Transfer machine code like this to required addresses. Step 5: Reset processor pin to execute instructions from Program Counter 0.

benjymous

If it's a holywood movie, then it'd take about half an hour to knock together something that'd boot into an email client so that you could send for help (magically forgetting the fact that there's no way to get to the internet, but hey, this is hollywood!) In the real world, you'll need some kind of development system to be able to bootstrap the "blank" machine - some way to construct a basic boot block on the hard disk, or a floppy This is how it's always been. The first PC would've been programmed from a mainframe running a cross assembler. Only once you're OS is stable enough to be able to host its own development tools would you be able to develop the rest of the OS on the machine itself. -- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!

Gary R Wheeler

I have a feeling the order of your instructions is a bit wonky.

Software Zen: delete this;

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Marc Clifton

dl4gbe wrote:

on a uninhabited island millions of miles from next human live.

To answer your question, yes, but I'd be more concerned with building a rocket ship to get back to earth. Marc Pensieve

Rhys Gravell

Marc Clifton wrote:

To answer your question, yes, but I'd be more concerned with building a rocket ship to get back to earth.

Top answer Sir :laugh: Rhys [Lotus Notes] is death by a thousand tiny annoyances—the digital equivalent of being kicked in the groin upon arrival at work every day. Jeff Atwater In the 60s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.